by Liv Rider
A cloud of sparks expanded from the space Aidan had filled. When they cleared, a gorgeous, pale-skinned man sprawled naked on the wooden floor, panting. His wide, startled eyes met Dev’s. They were a very familiar sky blue, and stripes of the same color ran through his black curls.
“Holy shit.” Aidan’s real voice was rougher than the mental version, and he looked shocked by the sound of it.
They stared at each other. Dev’s heart beat erratically, and he found he couldn’t unlock his gaze from Aidan’s. A strange sensation passed through him, but it wasn’t the itching, aggressive snarl of the beast jerking at its leash. No, this was something softer, less familiar. It felt like falling, and it terrified him.
“Holyyyyy shiiiiit,” Aidan said again, drawing the syllables out as if testing the movement of his lips. He had fantastic lips and, Dev couldn’t help noticing suddenly, fantastic everything. His eyes flicked down the miles of smooth skin to washboard abs and—yup. That was also fantastic.
He jerked his gaze back up. “That doesn’t usually happen then?” How long since Aidan had been human?
“Nope. This is…a first.” Aidan gave a shaky grin. “I’m doing a grand job at teaching you how to be a wolf, right? Be like me, but the opposite!” The sarcasm didn’t hide his rising panic, his voice going higher-pitched.
“A great job,” Dev agreed soothingly, kneeling beside him. Aidan’s breathing came in shallow gasps. “Breathe. Look at me sitting here all calm and non-threatening-like,” he echoed Aidan’s words from earlier back at him, hoping to distract him.
Aidan’s breathing stuttered into a strangled laugh. “Wolf lesson one: remain calm.”
“You have fae ears,” Dev observed, wondering if he’d found the one person with a more complicated family history than him. Aidan’s ears swept up to points, and now he was looking for it, the rest of his features had the kind of fine-boned cast to them that said high fae rather than werewolf. It made something in him relax. Fae he could deal with.
“Do I?” Aidan put a hand up to his ears and then froze. Slowly he stretched out his hands in front of him, turning them over and over as if hypnotized. His breathing hitched again, the pulse at his neck fluttering. “Oh my god. Oh my god! I have hands!”
Dev threaded his fingers through Aidan’s. “Hey!” Frightened blue eyes swung towards him. Christ, how did anyone get eyelashes that long and thick? “Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay that you have hands.” He squeezed Aidan’s hands. Time crystallized, until the world was only their locked gazes, warm entwined fingers, and their breathing slowly synchronizing. It felt strangely intimate, and that something in his chest twanged again.
Aidan grinned suddenly. It was like standing in the direct path of a sunbeam. “Are you kidding? This isn’t okay; this is fantastic! I have hands!” He squeezed for emphasis.
Dev jerked back to awareness, as if he’d suddenly hit the ground after a long fall. “What?”
Aidan no longer seemed on the verge of hysteria. “I have hands,” he repeated, still grinning, and the sight sent a jolt of longing right through Dev, making his heart thump. He pulled his hands sharply away from Aidan’s. A part of him mourned the loss of contact, and he told that part to shove it.
He got up. “You got some clothes somewhere?” Covering up that much raw hotness was criminal, but Dev desperately needed distance. Aidan was a werewolf, even if he didn’t look like one anymore. Why was it suddenly so hard to remember that fact?
“Clothes.” Aidan blinked at his still-outstretched hands, then tracked the rest of the way down his body with the same kind of stunned amazement. “I am super naked. Yes. Wow.” He wriggled his toes.
“How long were you a wolf for?” The way Aidan was looking at himself….
“Since I was ten years old,” Aidan said softly. The smile faded, an old, quiet hurt briefly taking its place. He prodded himself experimentally and then he lit up again like a goddamn sunbeam. “I did not look like this then. Have you seen me? I have abs! Great abs!”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Dev said hoarsely. Aidan’s abs were…yeah.
“Did you now?” Aidan looked up, brimming with mischief. His expression was too open, showing every emotion without a filter. Maybe it was just because he hadn’t had much practice at hiding them as a human. Dev’s heart jerked with a weird protective impulse at the thought, a sudden yearning to wrap the guy in a bone-crushing hug to keep that reckless sincerity safe from the world.
“I’d have to be dead not to notice, because you’re butt-ass naked,” he said dryly.
“So I am,” Aidan agreed without shame. He put his hands on the ground and wobbled his way to his feet, but he only made it upright for about two seconds before stumbling sideways. Dev caught him and helped him sink down onto the nearest chair, intensely aware of the heat of the other man’s skin. Aidan even smelled appealing—like rain and mint.
What does that even mean, ‘rain and mint’? Dev asked his libido, which had no answer to give except the unhelpful: maybe you should lick it and see.
Aidan glared down at his legs. “Bloody center of gravity’s in the wrong place.”
“How about I get you some clothes while you figure out physics?” Dev deserved a damn medal for making the offer. “You have clothes in this house, right?”
“Yeah, I can borrow some of Mahon’s.” Aidan twisted round to inspect his biceps. “Or Oscar’s, I guess, if his are too big. I don’t know. What size am I, do you think?”
“Couldn’t say without hard data.” The words were out before he could stop them.
Aidan stopped twisting and flushed right to the tips of his pointed ears. Dev had a sudden, shocking fantasy of running his fingers over them—he’d had a few hookups with fae, knew they tended to be extra sensitive there. He swallowed, the room’s temperature going up several degrees. Aidan wasn’t helping matters, not with that wide-eyed flustered expression, as if it was the first time anyone had ever flirted with him.
Fuck. Given the timeline, it probably was the first time.
Aidan looked back down at himself. “Ah. Clothes would be great. Upstairs. Room at the end of the hall, other side of the house.” His voice had gone husky, and that and the Irish accent ought to be illegal in all 50 states.
“Okay. I’ll…be back.” He backed out of the room. Taking deep breaths, he made his way through the house. What the hell had his intense reaction to Aidan been about? Yes, the guy was gorgeous, but Dev had met gorgeous men before—and none of them had made him feel so off-balance.
And none of them had been wolves. A shiver of unease went through him as he reminded himself of that fact. It had been all too easy to get distracted by Aidan’s big blue eyes and forget all the reasons why he needed to stay as far away as possible from wolves and everything wolf-adjacent. He’d worked so hard to build the Dev the rest of the world saw—in control, civilized, human—but right now the mask felt paper-thin.
The house was large, and the stairwell was at the opposite end from the kitchen, so he had plenty of time to think.
Sabas’s threat about not tolerating rogue wolves in his city came back to him, and he shoved it aside. It was irrelevant, because Dev wasn’t going to be a wolf. He was just going to fetch these clothes for Aidan, congratulate him on his newfound humanity, and then get the hell out of dodge before his weird reaction to the guy made him do something stupid.
The bedroom had the kind of mess that he recognized as caused by frantic packing, with clean clothes strewn over the bed and clear signs that two people occupied the room. Whoever Mahon and Oscar were, they were apparently a couple—and, more importantly, neither of them was with Aidan. That fact pleased him more than it should’ve.
He’d just reluctantly grabbed a random selection of clothes when a wolf’s desolate howl reverberated through the house and then abruptly cut off.
Chapter 5
Aidan clamped his jaws shut—his sharp-toothed wolf jaws. A deep sense of unfairness filled him, and it was an effort not to thr
ow back his head and howl again. Damn it! He hadn’t even had five whole minutes of being human before the wolf had snapped back into place.
He growled, digging his claws into the carpet. Like hell was he going back to no opposable thumbs! Closing his eyes, he drew furiously on the fresh memory of what being human had felt like. Smell and sound were dimmer, but the colors were so much brighter.
When he’d first been trapped in wolf form, he used to slam against the block in his mind over and over, hoping to shatter it and force himself back into human form. It had taken years of achieving nothing but splitting headaches to give up trying, for hope to wear down to resignation.
Now sharp-edged hope lodged painfully in his chest, and he threw himself against the block with renewed force. Arching his back, he tried to force his limbs to elongate. They stayed obstinately furry, and the mental block refused to budge, unforgiving as the walls of a goddamn fortress. His head began to pound.
“Aidan?” Dev skidded into the room, a bundle of clothes in one hand. Clothes Aidan no longer needed. His eyes widened. “You’re a wolf again.”
Time stopped, his body turning liquid and weightless, and then he was falling, off-balance but gloriously, wonderfully human. He wrapped his arms around the nearest support to stop himself planting face-first into the floor.
The nearest support happened to be Dev’s legs.
They both froze. Aidan hadn’t really noticed people’s attractiveness as a wolf, but bloody hell was he noticing it now. For the first time in his life, raw physical desire flared. Dev’s thighs felt rock-hard. Aidan wanted to dig his fingers into the muscle, wanted to lean forward and nuzzle….
Dev took a step back, and Aidan nearly fell over. Catching himself just in time, he shivered, not with cold but with lust. This is inappropriate, he told himself. Get a handle on it. But he didn’t know how to get a handle on it. Lust had always been an abstract concept before, and the burn in his veins was anything but. Cold showers—that’s what people always talked about, right? He imagined the cold night air on his overheated skin, but it just made him intensely aware that he had skin, so much more sensitive than a wolf’s coat.
“Did I…make you human again?” Dev sounded shaken.
“Seems like touching you does it.” Oh, and how Aidan wanted to touch him. He swallowed, trying to rein in the dizzying want. Dev wouldn’t respond well to that, given how much he disliked wolves. Even without the wolf-thing, Dev probably wouldn’t want some guy he’d just met inexpertly feeling him up. Aidan stared at his hands again, trying to focus, wishing he knew what the hell was going on.
“I’m not touching you now,” Dev pointed out. “And you’re still human. What made you turn back to a wolf before?”
“I don’t know! It just sort of happened. I couldn’t stop it.” He hated admitting that, admitting his brokenness. Just like when he’d been a kid, the change had snapped over him like a rubber band stretched too far, painful and abrupt.
He got slowly to his feet, putting a hand on the wall for balance this time rather than Dev’s knees. His legs felt impossibly tall and rickety. How did anyone balance on just two legs? You did it before as a kid, he reminded himself. You just have to remember. Like riding a bike. Except the ground was much further away than it had been then.
He couldn’t help noticing the way Dev’s pupils dilated before he looked away from Aidan’s nakedness. Despite everything, he preened. Whatever he looked like—and he needed to find a damn mirror soon—Dev clearly liked what he saw.
“You transformed when I went upstairs,” Dev said, still looking firmly in the direction of the kitchen bench rather than Aidan.
He didn’t like where Dev’s logic was going, but it was worth testing. He swallowed. “All right. Can you stay here for a minute, then?”
Dev watched him walk his way along the wall doubtfully. “You sure about this?”
“Hey, I’m not gonna re-learn to walk by standing still,” he said. The movement was coming back to him, though everything still felt strange.
“I wasn’t talking about the walking. You only just got back to human. You’re allowed to take a moment to adjust.” Dev’s dark eyes were steady, and Aidan had the sudden feeling they could see straight through his bullshit, see how terrified he was of risking losing his humanity again. Which was exactly why he had to do this.
He pasted on a grin. “Yep, I’m fine.”
Dev didn’t offer him the clothes, which saved him from having to refuse. Good to know they were thinking the same thing: no point trashing them if an uncontrolled change swept over him again. Most adult shifters learned the skill of keeping their clothing when they shifted, but Aidan had never had the chance.
It took him a painfully long time to reach the other side of the kitchen. His heart thrashed like a trapped bird and sweat broke out on the back of his neck, the sensation strange enough that he paused to wipe it with his fingers. Dread increased with every step he took away from Dev, and his shoulders hunched, waiting to see if this step was one too far.
He was panting but hopeful as he opened the slider door and made it out into the yard. Thank god the property was so large and screened from view by the tall trees along its borders. He and Mahon had chosen the property deliberately to avoid neighbors calling about stray dogs, but now it meant no one would be complaining about naked men either.
Not that Dev had seemed like he wanted to complain.
He hushed the stray thought. Walking without a wall to support him worked as long as he didn’t think too hard about what his legs were doing, letting them wobble their way along as if balancing on stilts. He stepped off the concrete terrace that ran along the back of the house, the lawn giving wetly under his bare feet.
The yard backed onto a reserve, and he almost made it to the tree line when he felt it, the involuntary change rising up from his bones. No! He tried to stop it, clinging to his form desperately, but it made no difference.
He collapsed, panting, wolf-claws sinking in to the soft grass.
Dev held out a hand without prompting, his expression full of sympathy. Aidan didn’t want sympathy, and he didn’t want to be the burden that outstretched hand implied. But he also didn’t want to spend the rest of his life as a wolf, so he sat back on his haunches and held out a paw.
Dev chuckled at the gesture and took it. At least Aidan’s wolf form wasn’t flooding him with fear-smell anymore.
That warm liquid feeling of elongation repeated, and Dev was still holding his hand when the change ended—his furless human hand. Which he should probably stop touching Dev with. But Dev resisted when he tried to pull away.
“Can you still change to wolf form with me touching you? You don’t have to try if you don’t want to,” he added hurriedly at Aidan’s sharp intake of breath.
“No, you’re right. Best to know what we’re dealing with.” It took him a moment to find the wall in his mind—a wall that now had a door in it. He braced himself and stepped through.
The feeling was the same in both directions—like taking a quick dip in warm sunlight—and he had paws again. Before Dev could say anything, he ran back to the wall and saw with relief that the door was still there. He threw himself through it, gripping Dev’s hand so tightly when he came out the other side that Dev winced.
“Sorry.” He immediately loosened his grip, but Dev didn’t let go, pulling him to his feet instead. They were
standing close enough that he could make out the individual hairs of Dev’s short, neatly clipped beard. What did stubble feel like on bare skin? Aidan wondered, and then had to fight an overwhelming urge to lean forward so he could find out.
Wow, I had no idea human instincts were so strong, he mused, fixing his gaze firmly on the wall behind Dev instead. He didn’t remember it being like this as a kid, but then again that had been pre-puberty. How did other people cope with feeling this strength of attraction all the time? Was this a normal level of attraction to feel?
“You’re welcome. This must be pretty strange for you.” Dev’s voice was gentle, and Aidan hardened himself against the temptation to beg Dev to stay here with him and keep him human. He knew better than to let himself rely on other people. It was better to pretend that you were fine, that you didn’t need them in the first place. It hurt less, in the long run, when they realized just how broken you were and left.
The doorbell rang.
Aidan took a sharp breath, stepped back, and forced himself to smile brightly. “That’ll be your ride.”
Chapter 6
Dev had completely forgotten about the pick-up he’d arranged.
Aidan shrugged. “I still think we should schedule some wolf lessons before full moon.” He grinned, though something about it rang false. “And now you can even have them without the literal wolf in the room!”
Wait. As far as they knew, Aidan could only stay human so long as he was within a certain radius of Dev, but he was just going to let him walk out the door?
“You’ll be a wolf again, if I leave,” he pointed out, confused.
“Not like that’s a new thing.” But Aidan took a deep, shuddering breath before pasting on a bright, fake smile again that wouldn’t have fooled a two-year-old. It made Dev’s chest ache. Why was Aidan even trying to pretend he was okay with this? He’d been stuck as a wolf for, what, twenty years or so? No one would be okay after that!